...I was reminded of this when reading Brendan O’Neill’s reflections on a recent debate hosted by Jacobin, the brazenly socialist magazine. The discussion proceeded as one might expect, consisting mostly of “bizarrely ahistorical handwringing over capitalism” from those on the socialist side, as well as a good dose of emotive venting — “more moralistic than Marxist, more Dickens than Trotsky,” O’Neill writes.
But amid the more typical complaints about greedy CEOs and working conditions, O’Neill pinpoints an underlying irony that offers plenty of insight. Alas, in a room comprised mostly of upper-class elites and “Park Slope socialists,” as O’Neill describes them, we’re reminded that anti-capitalism has become a privilege of the new bourgeoisie — of the new capitalists.
...What was once a movement of angsty, risk-prone socialist activists has now merged with a peculiar brand of disenchanted, comfortable elites, guilt-ridden by their economic success and outraged by the supposed “greed” of others, even as they continue to indulge in their own pet degrees of capitalistic excess. As O’Neill explains:
Anti-capitalism has become a fatalistic pursuit, a comforting exercise in complaint, a self-aggrandising knowingness about the lameness of life, the pastime, almost exclusively, of the time-rich and well-off, of the kind of people who have gentrified Williamsburg and annoyed their parents by becoming cultural-studies lecturers rather than corporate lawyers, who, lacking answers for now, for the weirdness of this era in which the founders of our society hate their founding values, offset everything into the future. They absolve themselves of the key struggle of our time — how to defend freedom and democracy from an establishment that is chipping away at them, from a bourgeoisie that has lost faith in itself — by saying: ‘Those freedoms will never be realised under capitalism anyway. Not really.’ As if they aren’t real. As if they couldn’t be made more real.
This is the thing: anti-capitalism is capitalism. It’s the form capitalism now takes. Self-loathing is the bread and butter of the 21st-century capitalist elite. Today, much anti-capitalism looks less like an independent strike against the elite than an externalisation of the elite’s contempt for its system and values, a colourful playing out of a top-down rot. Last night’s clapping bourgeois worriers over the working class looked to me less like revolutionaries in waiting, than yet more uncritical footsoliders of capitalism’s own self-doubt.
...
The Economics and Political Science Room
Reply With Quote